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Run Lola Run
Run Lola Run (German: Lola rennt, literally Lola Runs) is a 1998 German crime thriller film written and directed by Tom Tykwer and starring Franka Potente as Lola and Moritz Bleibtreu as Manni. The story follows a woman who needs to obtain 100,000 German marks (50,984 Euro) in 20 minutes to save her boyfriend's life. The film's three scenarios are reminiscent of the 1981 Krzysztof Kieślowski film Blind Chance; following Kieślowski's death, Tykwer directed his planned film Heaven. Plot The film begins with Lola (Franka Potente) receiving a phone call from her distraught boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu). He is a small-time criminal and has lost 100,000 marks belonging to his crime boss by accidentally leaving it on a train (Lola was supposed to pick him up, but her moped was stolen while she was buying cigarettes). After the doors of the train closed, he saw a homeless man pick up the bag of money but he was unable to get back onto the train before it left the station. Upon not seeing any trace of his money or the homeless man at the next station, Manni assumes the money is long gone. Manni has to get the money within 20 minutes before his boss finds out, and plans to rob a nearby supermarket. Lola urges him to wait and tells him she will sort out the money. She decides to ask her father (Herbert Knaup), who is a bank manager. The main part of the film is divided in three "runs". Each run starts from the same situation but develops differently and has a different outcome. Each run contains various flash-forward sequences, showing how the lives of the people that Lola bumps into develop after the encounter. In each run, those people are affected in different ways. First run Lola starts running and encounters a punk with a dog in the staircase. The dog growls at her, causing her to sprint faster. Lola runs through the streets of Berlin towards her father's bank. She collides with a woman pushing a baby carriage, who curses her - a flash forward then shows the woman's child being taken away by Child Care leading her to steal someone else's baby. Continuing, Lola runs alongside a man on a bike who offers to sell it to her. She says no, and a flash-forward shows the man having his bike stolen in a mugging but eventually marrying a nurse at the hospital he met during his recovery. Lola then causes a man (who is later shown to be her father's colleague) to be involved in a small car accident. When she arrives at the bank, Lola's father refuses to give her money, telling her that he feels unappreciated at home, that he is leaving Lola and her mother for his mistress who is expecting his child and that he is not Lola's real father. Also at the bank Lola passes one woman in the hallway who is shown in a flash-forward to be paralysed in a violent car accident, then killing herself shortly after. Lola runs on to meet Manni, arriving a few moments after the deadline. Manni's robbery is already in progress; Lola decides to help him rob the store. The two flee on foot afterwards but find themselves surrounded by police, and a nervous police officer accidentally shoots Lola in the chest. The scene fades out to show Lola and Manni talking in bed, with Lola questioning Manni about his love for her. While answering Manni's question as to whether she's leaving him, Lola says "Stop!" and the film restarts at the point where she started running. Second run In the second run, the punk with the dog trips Lola, injuring her leg and making her limp slightly. She collides once again with the woman pushing a baby carriage, but a flash forward this time shows the woman winning a lottery. She once again meets the man on the bike but this time accusing him of stealing it, which a flash forward reveals leads him to become a homeless tramp who looks identical to the tramp on the train that distracted Manni. Lola again causes a car accident involving the father's colleague. Lola arrives at the bank a few moments later because of her limp, which leaves enough time for her father's mistress to explain that she is pregnant by someone else. Lola hears more of the argument this time, and becomes infuriated. She robs her father's bank with a gun grabbed from the bank's security officer, escapes because the police mistake her for a fleeing hostage, and takes off with the money to meet Manni. A flash-forward shows the lady who passes Lola in the hallway later settling down with the cashier who hands Lola the money at gunpoint. When Lola reaches Manni, he hears her call his name, but he is run over by an ambulance as he crosses the street to meet her. The scene again fades to Lola and Manni in bed, this time with the roles reversed: Manni questions Lola about her love for him. The film briefly returns to the present day and shows Manni refusing to die, before restarting once more at the beginning of Lola's run. Third run The third time Lola is a split second faster, as she leaps over the punk on the steps. This time she neither collides with the woman and her baby carriage nor causes an accident, and the business associate is able to pick up Lola's father. This time, the man on the bike bumps into the tramp who is revealed to have taken the money, and sells the bike to him at an inflated price. Lola misses her father completely and keeps on running. She enters a casino, buys a single 100-mark chip, and finds a roulette table. She wins two consecutive bets on the number "20", which gives Lola 123,500 marks, more than enough money to help Manni. She hitches a ride in the ambulance from the other runs, as it stops. The ambulance is carrying the security guard from her father's bank who has apparently suffered a heart attack. She takes his hand, and moments later, his heart rate begins to return to normal. Meanwhile, Manni sees the homeless man riding the bike. Manni chases him, inadvertently causing a car crash involving Lola's father, his business associate, and the man who stole Lola's moped in the first place. Manni retrieves his money, but the homeless man asks for Manni's gun in return. Feeling sorry for the homeless man, Manni gives him his gun. Lola arrives to find Manni stepping out of a car and shaking his boss's hand. The movie ends with Manni asking Lola what is in the bag she is carrying. Themes The film features two allusions to Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo. Like that film, it features recurring images of spirals, such as the 'Spirale' Cafe behind Manni's phone box and the spiral staircase down which Lola runs. In addition, the painting on the back wall of the casino of a woman's head seen from behind is based on a shot in Vertigo: Tykwer disliked the empty space on the wall behind the roulette table and commissioned production designer Alexander Manasse to paint a picture of Kim Novak as she appeared in Vertigo. Manasse could not remember what she looked like in the film and so decided to paint the famous shot of the back of her head. The painting took fifteen minutes to complete.2 There are also several references to German culture in the film. The most notable is the use of Hans Paetsch as a narrator. Paetsch is a famous voice of children's stories in Germany, recognized by millions. Many of the small parts are cameo roles by famous German actors (for example the bank teller). Also, two quotes by German football legend Sepp Herberger appear: "The ball is round, the game lasts 90 minutes, everything else is pure theory," and, "After the game is before the game." The film touches on themes such as free will vs. determinism, the role of chance in people's destinies, and obscure cause-effect relationships. Through brief flash-forward sequences of still images, Lola's fleeting interactions with bystanders are revealed to have surprising and drastic effects on their future lives, serving as concise illustrations of chaos theory's butterfly effect, in which minor, seemingly inconsequential variations in any interaction can blossom into much wider results than is often recognized. The film's exploration of the relationship between chance and conscious intention comes to the foreground in the casino scene, where Lola appears to defy the laws of chance through sheer force of will, impossibly making the roulette ball land on her winning number with the help of a glass-shattering scream. The thematic exploration of free will vs. determinism is made clear from the start. In the film's brief prologue, an unseen narrator asks a series of rhetorical questions that prime the audience to view the film through a metaphysical lens touching on traditional philosophical questions involving determinism vs. philosophic libertarianism, as well as epistemology. The theme is reinforced through the repeated appearance of blind women who briefly interact with major characters in each alternative reality (each "run"), and seem to have supernatural understandings of both the present and potential futures in those realities. The film ultimately seems to favor a compatiblist philosophical view to the free will question as evidenced by the casino scene and by the final telephone booth scene in which one of the blind women redirects Manni's attention to a passerby, which enables him to make an important choice near the film's climax. Critic Reception The film was nominated for 41 awards, including the BAFTA Award for Best Film not in the English Language. It won 26. These included the Grand Prix of the Belgian Syndicate of Cinema Critics, the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Best Film at the Seattle International Film Festival, and seven separate wins at the German Film Awards. As of September 2008, the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 92% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 79 reviews. On Metacritic, another review aggregator, the film had an average score of 77 out of 100, based on 29 reviews, stating the film as having "generally favourable reviews". The Internet Movie Database, IMDb, shows Run Lola Run as having earned 8 out of 10. In contrasting reviews, Film Threat's Chris Gore said of the film, "It delivers everything great foreign films should - action, sex, compelling characters, clever filmmaking, it's unpretentious (a requirement for me) and it has a story you can follow without having to read those annoying subtitles. I can't rave about this film enough -- this is passionate filmmaking at its best. One of the best foreign films, heck, one of the best films I have seen", while Jonathan Rosenbaum of The Chicago Reader stated, "About as entertaining as a no-brainer can be--a lot more fun, for my money, than a cornball theme-park ride like "Speed," and every bit as fast moving. But don't expect much of an aftertaste." The film was released on DVD on 21 December 1999 and on Blu-ray on 19 February 2008. Ranked #86 in Empire magazines "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010. Trailer Film Feature Category:1998 films Category:Chase films Category:Crime films Category:Films set in Berlin Category:Films with live action and animation Category:German films Category:German-language films Category:Satirical films Category:Thriller films Category:Time travel films